PrimalSoup said:

You can progress from working on self to working on reality itself.

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MrCraggles said:

What does that even mean?

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kabel said:

MrCraggles said:

What does that even mean?

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To me it means working on making your real life better. Diet, exercise, aligning your sleep schedule, learning to focus and do rather than ruminate, improving social relationships, career, helping others. I don't know how much any of those things are factors with you, but they are commonly out of sync in those with depression.

All of that should make your psychedelic induced depression relief more long lasting, and increase serotonin receptors, and BDNF, so you won't need double the shrooms to reach the same state as everyone else. You know, synergy and alignment between this world and that, body and mind. Psychedelics sometimes work by teaching that.

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Vibe_Enthusiast said: Is there like steps in the process of feeling yourself dilute into cosmic nothingness? Lol. Fuck, it sounds so wild.

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MrCraggles said:

PrimalSoup said:

Nah, it sounded like the pure product to me.  And really - does it even matter?

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I guess you're right it shouldn't matter. It was a profound and beautiful experience. But if I know I'm missing out on the real deal then I can't help but want to experience it.

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Missing out...   Just go back and read your own posts about it!  Besides, the well doesn't go dry just 'cause you drank from it.

MrCraggles said:

What does that even mean?

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Partly it's the Buddhist idea of taking your enlightenment (or whatever you like to call it - realization, flow consciousness, cosmic unity, etc. etc.) out into the world and affecting it positively.  That's where you really learn if it was real or imaginary.

And beyond that it's going deeper into hyperdimensional realms and learning the ways and means to improve your reality itself.

In other words turn your focus outwards.  It's the last step in the traditional Zen Ox Herding illustrations of the stages:

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Yes I want total ego loss. I've been massaging it with high doses of mushrooms for eight months. I want the full on experience.

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He has never taken more than 3g since as it absolutely terrified him.

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I have been here before. It feels a lot like dying. It feels like the skin is being blasted from my bones. Except you are hallucinating the bones. There is nothing. Plains of despair and windswept misery. When you have abolished yourself. When you wake up within your misery and question your plans. When you fall asleep within yourself and have to do this to wake up. Then it becomes frightening. When your psychosis is normality. When you have stolen your own identity.

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To put it bluntly - sometimes you go insane. And then you die. Even if the trip then turns into something blissful and amazing at that point it's a very harsh way to trip until you learn to think of that kind of oblivion as a refuge from the madness.

If you are getting beautiful and profound experiences of reality disintegrating around you at high doses, it's hard to suggest anything in particular you should be doing differently! Maybe after a few different experiences of this kind you will feel more like you have had a 'full on' experience - no two trips are the same.

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Maybe I'll never get the death aspect of what you're saying is correct.

I guess it isn't really an issue because I get to have all of the benefits of ego dissolution without the terror. Happy days!

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It's possible you might end up in that kind of trip, if , say, you'd not tripped for a while, then tripped on a high dose of shrooms again and really caught yourself unprepared because you'd forgotten how strong they were. Also there is always the possibility that you become over-confident and unexpectedly find yourself in what feels like a 'bad trip'....

It wouldn't really make sense to deliberately cultivate an unpleasant experience just to see what happens when you lose all hope and surrender to your own death... you would have to be somewhat twisted. If you do get a trip that feels a lot more 'wrong' than usual, just ride it out; it will ultimately take you to the same familiar positive headspace when it crashes down on you, and you can compare it to your usual trips.



The experience you talked about sounded like very strong ego dissolution (with some unusually cool visuals) followed by a series of epiphanies about your personal life. Even if you do manage to reach a point that you think of later as being a 'complete absence of self', at that precise moment there isn't really anything happening, it's more or less like 'falling asleep' into the trip ("dying") and then having this other oceanic / universal feeling rise up and giving you all these feelings of epiphany e.t.c as you return to your senses.

You might find in other trips that the kind of 'epiphanies' you get are more metaphysical and weird, as though you are unearthing great secrets of the universe - an experience of this kind might leave you feeling as though you have reached something more "full on".



I wouldn't get too bogged down with the metaphysical mechanics of what happens when your brain reboots itself in the middle of a very heavy trip and whether you are there or not there. Really all you want is a trip that leaves you feeling sufficiently amazed that you think 'wow, get to fuck with your explanations - now that's an ego death trip!' - at which point you can taunt newcomers to the shroomery by describing this experience in detail and telling them if they didn't experience it just like that, it wasn't ego death...

I'm only half-joking - you have to look at a trip as a whole to judge what kind of value you got out of it - was it weird/ funny/ profound/ amazingly visual/ entertaining/ frightening/ spiritual/ insightful/ awe-inspiring/ amazing? Box-ticking specific aspects (like "a complete absence of self") in minute detail is a bit pointless; if you reach new heights (or depths) of amazingness in your trips they will make their presence known, and this sort of 'holy fuck!' moment is often what people are trying to express by the term 'ego death', even if the exact definition is a tangled web of confusion and contradiction.

Do be sure to report back on further experiences! As someone once said:

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I discovered the 'secret to the universe' on my first trip. Then discovered it again on my second trip. But it was different.

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I just ate a shit ton of shrooms and now i think i'm the 15th Dalai Lama.

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That's just how I roll. Replace "the 15th Dalai Lama" with "God" in that sentence and that was indeed my modus operandi for these kind of trips.



From an old trip journal, just as the shroom trip is closing in for its final assault:

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Never again. This is 16 shades of hell. I cannot fight, let alone face, let alone try to describe

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Play God. You will understand.

I say: Play God

I say: Play God

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You guys are trying to describe an experience that's 99% subjective.

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BAD TRIP HOTLINE

Your death is being held in a queue. Please continue to hold. Please try to stay calm as the panic attack intensifies.

Please choose from the following options to allow us to direct your stomach-churning drug-fuelled kaleidoscopic delusional psychosis to the correct department:

*If you are lost within a maze of lies and confusion, press 1

*If you have discovered a new color and that color is all your worst nightmares condensed into hell, press 2.

*If you are tumbling through a million different deaths in order to find your own, press 3.

*If you have been brought back from the dead and wish to register a complaint about it, press 4.

*If you are being dive-bombed through 36000 feet of madness, press 5

*If you have been soured by a reptilian myth into oceans of disaster, press 6.

*If you are riding the deathships, with blood on the decks, press 7

*If you see subway trains being torn apart by alien limbs every time you close your eyes , press 8

*If you are trapped under the rubble inside the cities of the dead, press 9

*If you have lost all hope dial 0, and as you spiral into new dimensions each more horrific than the last, know that the
phones lines are down, and understand that you are the only one here and that you are talking to yourself.

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Your ideas are derailed and the moon is made of rotting badgers and to shut us up they had to give me free drugs and a hospital and a series on BBC2 and I've heard there are people high up in the government that dread news of my movements and are awaiting urgent news on the contents of lost containers from the USS Urban Terrorism that were supposed to be delivered to the controller of BBC2 before they abolished parliament and re-started WWII and left us books in Japanese and took away all the people I was actually quite fond of and called it a job and called it Nigel and made me train it like a lion and release it into the wild in Zimbabwe.

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MrCraggles said:

I'm ABSOLUTELY going to do it again in two weeks. But somehow I can't imagine it ever living up to what I experienced the other day! Hopefully though!

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Psion said:

Lol, Captcook is hardly a norm. The problem with psychs isn't addiction like other drugs, but if you have a personal or family history of behavioral abuse or mental disorders like schizophrenia or psychosis. 

If you don't have these your probably fine. Unless your willing to dose like 400% more than usual daily tolerance prevents abuse anyways.

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AstralAurora said:

Psion said:

Lol, Captcook is hardly a norm. The problem with psychs isn't addiction like other drugs, but if you have a personal or family history of behavioral abuse or mental disorders like schizophrenia or psychosis. 

If you don't have these your probably fine. Unless your willing to dose like 400% more than usual daily tolerance prevents abuse anyways.

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Everytime he falls into depression or an issue he will look towards psychs because they helped him in the past.This way you become dependant on the substance (in this case).Better off do what you can do with your body and mind alone instead of requiring external help.The more shrooms, the less actual knowledge he is going to get on this life journey.

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uh. you're making a strange association there. if something helps in the past, of course it's reasonable to try them first if you have the same problem again. that's not dependence, other than them being dependable for fixing issues. dependence would be if they helped in the past, someone takes them thinking it will do so again, it doesn't, and then they desperately keep taking it to the detriment of their regular life hoping to fix the problem when the old solution no longer works.

if i have a migraine and i take Excedrin to get rid of it, does that mean i'm dependent and addicted to Excedrin because i take it whenever i feel a migraine rearing its ugly head? no, because on occasion it doesn't work then i'm having to try other methods until its fixed.

there is nothing wrong with taking external help when needed. medicine is medicine. it's there to help you when you have a problem. sure, its nice if you're healthy enough that you don't need the medicine, but no one is so healthy that they never have to see a doctor or take meds for issues that arise in life.

meditation and mental training is certainly excellent and highly recommended, but it's not going to fix everything. sometimes the problem is hormonal. or genetic. sometimes a major life crisis upends your entire world and you no longer can find your center and need outside assistance.

making blanket statements like "taking more shrooms = less actual spiritual growth" is a rather blanket statement and not reflective of actual reality, which abhors absolutes even more than nature abhors a vacuum. (which come to think of it, is also an absolute. ) there's plenty of room for people who take shrooms often to come out with more spiritual growth than they would otherwise. heck, i've tripped as often as once a week for a couple months and didn't have any problems from it. i may have grumbled about having to wait a few months after that because i didn't have any money for cactus and my shrooms kept triching out, but i hardly was addicted. i just played some video games or read a book or just mused on life like normal.

well, as normal as i ever get anyways. i think friends and family alike would agree i'm hardly a normal person.

MrCraggles said:

I used psychedelics once a week (mainly mushrooms) in high doses for six months. Sometimes twice a week.

Two months ago it changed to once every two weeks in high doses.

I have never been happier. I had bad depression and anxiety before this for which I was very highly medicated on six different meds.

Now I have no depression or anxiety and I take only one medication for mental health, which I am weaning off (after weaning off everything else).

I train at the gym with weights five times a week, I go running, cycling, walking. I see friends, family, go on dates. I do uncle duties all of the time as well as help with my best friend's kids. I have hobbies, interests.

I'm totally involved with life and I'm having absolutely no negative consequences of using psychedelics. None whatsoever. Not even slightly.

The opposite has been true in my case; they've completely helped me. Previously I was unable to leave my bed most days, never mind the house. I abused dangerous drugs to escape the pain and ended up in two comas and nearly died. Now I very rarely drink or use any drugs apart from psychedelics. I avoided life completely. I didn't exercise. I was totally incapacitated by my mental health. I had panic attacks. I was a mess.

Now all of those things have stopped. Everyone has noticed a very fast, and very big difference in me. Like a miracle.

As far as I can see as long as you have no previous psychosis and you're relatively intelligent then it seems quite safe to trip at a high frequency. And I never ever have a bad trip. The worst I've ever had is a sense of foreboding on about three occasions and even then it didn't dominate the whole trip. And that was on lower doses! Every trip has been beneficial to me as far as I can see.

I'm certainly having an amazing time with it, and an amazing life since beginning this journey! It has transformed me! I look healthy and muscular because of the gym training, I'm always smiling and have energy, I have more empathy and compassion, I also quit smoking six months ago.
If psychedelics were having a negative impact on my life then I would use them less or stop. The aim is to be happy. I'm not going to continue doing something that isn't making me happy.

Thanks for the concern but it really isn't justified.

I don't get capncook the other week he was just saying to me how much psychedelics have helped his mental health!

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